I've just watched the music video for Alive, by Chase & Status (and featuring Jacob Banks), and found it to be one of the most powerful and moving music videos I've ever seen.In different parts of the story it tells, it features the smoking of two very different recreational drugs (crack cocaine, and tobacco, I believe).I think it is very much worth watching. I hope you do, too...

I agree that’s it’s a powerful video showing the struggles of a current generation of native Americans trying to break out of a environment surrounded in poverty and drugs while holding on to their heritage. I’ve no knowledge of how widespread this problem is among reservation communities but it does seem something of a concern.

William wrote:I agree that’s it’s a powerful video showing the struggles of a current generation of native Americans trying to break out of a environment surrounded in poverty and drugs while holding on to their heritage. I’ve no knowledge of how widespread this problem is among reservation communities but it does seem something of a concern.

Sorry that I haven't replied sooner. I appreciate your taking the time to watch the video and share your thoughts on it, William. I concur

I drug addiction counselor told me that drug use goes hand in hand with poverty. I would think that the scars of being a people dispossessed by an aggressor with only one aim, extinction, so as to take all the land, run very deep. All the instinctual anger and fear, rooted in shame, although transformed by the current environmental conditions, is still potently alive on the reservations. I would bet that if any of us, who at least some kind of a viable life, would be overcome to witness their conditions.

Because Aframericans stood up for themselves, they have made sizable gains. The large-scale programs put in place to help them, ala The War on Poverty, came into being but with largely dubious results. The point is that such was never done for the American Indians. From what I know, the current US policy, following the lead of the settlers, is content to let them languish and die. The only thing that we have allowed them is reservation gambling, which although a windfall for some Indians, is largely unavailable to most.

Pipe smoking: the most cultivated taking of tobacco; a good friend and a sublime addiction; but give me a cigar, too. But so expensive: smoke up and smoke less.